As this is a lengthy and somewhat technical post, here’s a summary. The AIM marketplace matches officers with their next assignment. After resume exchanges and interviews, officers and units each submit a ranking of their preferences. Then, human resources runs the Gale-Shapley algorithm to determine the matches. However, there is considerable scheming in the form of both parties revealing/lying about their preferences and units pressuring officers to rank them highly. I wanted to understand how varying degrees of scheming affected the optimality of the match and, in particular, whether rule breaking was incentivized under these conditions. I found that rule breaking is advantageous under almost all circumstance for both units and officers. Those that don’t break the rules perform worse on average. The rule breaking allows both units and officers to outperform the Gale-Shapley baseline. There are a number of limitations to these findings based on the simplifications inherent in modeling a complicated, dynamic process.
Programming Projects
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A Chinese Salesman in Shippan
Shippan is a beautiful community of a hundred houses or so that sit on a peninsula in the Long Island sound. It’s a popular place to go for a walk, and I have spent considerable time running there. One day, as I was running around this neighborhood, I began to think about visiting every home. How long would it take to walk every street?
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The NFL just had its annual draft. My team, the Chicago Bears, had the first overall pick and traded down. The Chicago Blackhawks also recently won the lottery for the first NHL draft pick with considerable excitement about potential generational talent Connor Bedard. The Chicago Bulls lottery pick fell outside of the top four and their pick thus went to the Orlando Magic. For all the excitement, how big of a difference does this all make? How reliably does having a higher draft pick translate to drafting a better player?
Books
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I feel very conflicted about American Pastoral. On the one hand, I found it to be more thought-provoking than the average novel in its heart-breaking exploration of American decline. On the other, I found it often boring and too long. This isn’t that unusual when reading the books with the literati’s seal of approval, but it was different from the other Roth novels I’ve read. I don’t recall being annoyed by the writing style in Portnoy’s Complaint or The Plot Against America. Maybe I’ve just grown more impatient as a reader over the past few years. Perhaps this is a reflection of a new form of American demise Roth did not live long enough to comment on: the loss of attention span symptomatic of TikTok brain rot. I am hesitant to be negative about a book that received such critical acclaim, but at the same time I have read a lot of “classics” that didn’t make me this bored.
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Hopefully, one (I) can be forgiven for wondering what the hell this book is actually about. Yes, there are obvious themes, and even a final tell-all raging monologue, but 440 pages is a lot of hand-wringing for what Linkin Park so eloquently summarized as “in the end, it doesn’t even matter”. Journey to the End of the Night is a chaotic, gloomy novel that often left me feeling depressed. The colloquial writing is easy to read and often beautifully prosaic. Celine has a good sense of humor, and the various historical settings make for an interesting plot. Still, it can be a slog to read a hero’s journey to discover that people are rotten and indignity is all there is.
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I finally finished this epic narrative history of the Civil War. This volume, though it followed a decade after the previous one, is stylistically the same. There are fewer major campaigns, with Lee and Grant at a stalemate for basically a year. Meanwhile, Sherman’s campaigns in Georgia and the Carolinas are practically unopposed. I feel like I’ve already shared my major observations, so this will be a few disparate remaining thoughts I have.
Other Writing
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We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-
industrialacademic complex. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower (in an alternate universe) -
Because I believe that other humans are the most interesting and valuable thing in the world. This will be a running log of mildly interesting casual encounters with strangers.
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He entered through the patio door when an unsuspecting victim went out to grill some hamburgers. He had embarked, along with several thousand of his kin, to escape the heat of the Colorado summer and find some solace at elevation as his kind had done for generations. When he saw the open door, he sensed the cool air conditioning. Instinct led him into the greatest battle of his life.